TUNG MUNG KEI YUN / WAIT ‘TIL YOU’RE OLDER (2005)

Slightly bewildering kid’s fantasy pic about a dysfunctional family (Dad, Step-Mom, Step-Son, Younger-Son) who can’t get past the past. The first-wife/ mother died (a suicide?) while the father was already involved with the wife-to-be, and now troublesome first-son has taken to running away. Brought home, he goes to war against Step-Mom, telling her how much he hates her and tearing the place up. Fine, now he’ll get thrown out! Meanwhile, crisis at the boy’s high school where Dad coaches, and a players’ mutiny has broken out over the team roster. Lose and the school gets demoted into a lower league. All handled in a wearying high-energy style (like a hyper-active live-action show on Nickelodeon or Disney Family) by director Teddy Chan who must drink a pail of coffee each morning. But the tone darkens once the kid meets a strange tramp chemist (??) who gives him an aging potion that turns him into . . . Andy Lau. (It’s always a good thing to turn into Andy Lau, but still . . . ) Suddenly grown, if not quite emotionally adult, he starts to see other sides to his problems, empathizing, even with Step-Mom, and flirting with the hot teacher he’s got a crush on. I got it! Hong Kong BIG, right? Well, not exactly, as the aging process can’t be turned off or turned around. He’ll be an old man in a couple of days, and dead before the credits roll. Yikes! (Bye- bye hyper-active kid’s tv; Hello Kurosawa’s IKIRU.) Fascinating, as East is East/West is West cultural guidepost; less so as film project.

DOUBLE-BILL: Might as well revisit BIG/’88 which is almost as strange if you bother to think about it. Especially the sex initiation storyline which, if uncomfortably thought thru, is technically statutory rape. And, if that’s not distasteful enough, imagine the situation with a gender reversal. Tom Hanks character swapped out for a girl who ‘gets big’ and giddily loses her virginity screwing a thirty-five year old office-mate. Delightful! Then recall that the co-writer & director aren’t clueless Hollywood guys, but clueless heavyweight Hollywood women.

FRANTZ (2016)

François Ozon is one of those excessively talented writer/ directors who out-thinks himself, like a track runner unaware he’s already lapped the guy coming up in front of him. Here, a touching but flawed expansion of the same post-WWI Maurice Rostand play that made a touching but flawed Early Talkie for Ernst Lubitsch (THE MAN I KILLED/’32), is over-beaten. Lubitsch’s pic, sans expected saucy tone & naughty subject matter, was a big flop in its day, though critically well-received. Quickly retitled BROKEN LULLABY, even more quickly forgotten, it’s recently been reevaluated upwards, a strong pacifist fable about a guilt-ridden French soldier who goes to a German town to ask forgiveness from the family of ‘the man I killed.’ Unable to get his confession out, and having been seen laying flowers on the grave, both parents & fiancé assume a Paris friendship before the war; a lie he doesn’t deny. Ozon skips Lubitsch’s stunning prologue (Armistice Anniversary Day, Paris 1919), to jump directly into the German town, the cemetery, family complications. But since you’ll guess why the soldier is there, there’s little added suspense. Ozon wants to emphasize the feminine/German perspective, knowing, as Lubitsch & Rostand couldn’t, that the war to end all wars didn’t. But his larger change comes after the big confession and his return to France. In an entirely new story arc, the girl follows in pursuit, a narrative parabola with nearly as many lies used to get to her goal. And the story becomes less who than what she will find. Working largely in b&w, with color reserved for recollections (false & true), and for moments of high emotion, much in here is lovely, if at times over genteel. (A dance hall sequence with far more woman than men is a gem.) In general, the men are more believable than the women who all seem a decade too modern for 1919. (Though Paula Beer, as the fiancé, is a fine actress and a heart-stopping beauty in b&w or color.) And how interesting, in a scene where the dead boy’s father confronts the town’s old guard on how they sent their boys off to die willingly, eagerly, to see how close it is to the Lubitsch. Swings-and-roundabouts in what does & doesn’t work between two films which compliment rather than cancel each other out.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: (If you can find it!), THE MAN I KILLED. Released in January of ‘32, the film, in spite of Early Talkie pacing & technology, is loaded with finds. Not just the prologue, but in dozens of marvelous town life details in this first collaboration for Lubitsch & favorite scripter Samson Raphaelson. With unforgettable turns for Lionel Barrymore & Louise Carter as the parents, even if the soppy romantic perfs of Phillips Holmes & Nancy Carroll drag.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-man-i-killed-broken-lullaby-1932.html

CONTEST: Name the connection (a tough six degrees of separation puzzle) between this film and both Mary Pickford & Lillian Gish to win a MAKSQUIBS film Write-Up of your choosing.

THE SECRET GARDEN (1949)

The second film version of Frances Hodson Burnett’s oft-dramatized story doesn’t shy from its darker elements, the famous children’s novel might have been written by a Brontë sister, but is too poorly served by director Fred M. Wilcox to do more than hint at its potential. It begins in death, as fast-growing child-star Margaret O’Brien (in her last M-G-M assignment) is orphaned out of India and into the haunted household of embittered uncle Herbert Marshall. He’s rarely around, traumatized by his wife’s death ten years ago and paralyzed son Dean Stockwell. Along with local country lad Brian Roper, the three children secretly revive a mysterious locked garden on the estate that holds the key to past events and future hopes. Psychologically compelling, you’ll see why so many have been drawn to it, but while the supporting players give tasty perfs (Elsa Lanchester, Gladys Cooper, Reginald Owen, George Zucco), along with a phenomenally personable black raven, the crucial child performers are all over the place. O’Brien, though maturing into a lovely 12-yr-old, has developed annoying acting habits, still pushing the same buttons that made her a star at five in JOURNEY FOR MARGARET/’42. Unable to regulate the youngsters on screen, Wilcox stumbles just as badly with action & camera placement, saved to some extent by elegant art design and Ray June’s handsome cinematography. There’s a reason he made just 10 pics in 20 years.*

DOUBLE-BILL: Agnieszka Holland’s ‘93 remake (not seen here) is usually cited as the SECRET GARDEN standard.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Wilcox, who made his rep on a couple of LASSIE pics, never did developed much technique. Easy B-list programmers, like CODE TWO/’53 (a cops on motorbikes saga) fall flat; and even FORBIDDEN PLANET/’56 (his admired interplanetary gloss on Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST) only survives directorial embalming via cool design elements & amusing Shakespearean parallels.

TAKE HER, SHE'S MINE (1963)

It’s a little painful to watch middle-aged Hollywood vets trying to stay in touch with the fast-changing youth-culture of the ‘60s. Even when they did manage to briefly pull even with the ins-and-outs of the cultural/ sexual/social Zeitgeist, by the time the film came out, it’d all look hopelessly square & dated. Take this adaptation of a hit B’way play by Henry & Phoebe Ephron. On stage, Art Carney, Phyllis Thaxter, Elizabeth Ashley & Richard Jordan put it across by laughing over Dad as he faced a Kennedy-esque New Frontier agenda, making adjustments as his not-so-little girl took off for college and modern womanhood (sex, social protests, the coffeehouse folk scene).* Two years on, Nunnally Johnson’s script ‘opens it up’ for James Stewart, Audrey Meadows, Sandra Dee & Philippe Forquet (who he?) with extra adventures and a new Paris-based third act. Everybody tries hard to make the generational clashes non-idiotic (Stewart in particular tones down his broad comic playing of the period), but it remains faintly embarrassing anyway. The main tactic is to have over-protective Dad rush to the rescue at the first sign of female libido or rebellion. (On a positive note, he does share a single bed with Meadows. Progress!) One neatly developed scene (from the play?) has Stewart join a freedom of speech ‘sit-in’ even while disagreeing with the speech in question; and it’s fun seeing Bob Denver as a laid-back folk singer. But the film only takes something approaching true comic flight in a studio backlot Paris when a magnificently funny Robert Morley comes on as a father with his own parental issues, and then proceeds to demonstrate exactly how to play these things. Working on a different level of inspired lunacy (did he write his own cuckoo dialogue?), even Henry Koster’s staid direction can’t keep him down. It’s only a turn, but a delicious one.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Opening a week before President Kennedy’s assassination, the film never had a chance to find an audience before it disappeared.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The play’s two daughters presumably inspired by real-life Ephrons, Nora & Delia.

DOUBLE-BILL: Dee, who shares top-billing with Stewart, played coming-of-age types for nearly a decade. Few of her films have aged well, but Vincente Minnelli’s piss-elegant THE RELUCTANT DEBUTANTE/’58 and Douglas Sirk’s astonishing IMITATION OF LIFE/’59 show a surprising range she never followed up on.

CAPTAIN FROM CASTILE (1947)

Unexpectedly fine historical adventure about the Spanish conquest of Mexico has real sweep to it. Not a swashbuckler, in spite of the title, which may explain Henry King’s vigorous helming. Always a bit stiff on the light fantastic, King saves his full attention for serious intent (even if fictionalized) & something thoughtful to chew on. Writer/producer Lamar Trotti gives two films in one here: first a 16th Century Spanish Inquisition tale of injustice with Tyrone Power & his Spanish grandee family under threat; then an impulsive jump to the New World with hopes of fortune & vindication soldiering for Hernando Cortez & his army of conquerors. The first half is particularly satisfying, solidly constructed and exciting. And if Barbara Lawrence makes little mark as Power’s intended*, a reined in Lee J. Cobb & debuting Jean Peters do very well. (That is, if you can accept Peters as a Spanish servant girl.) The second part is less tightly bound, but what a load of interesting history. (And not crazy off the mark as these things go; though medically, what a resilient bunch they prove to be!) The scale of production is pretty phenomenal, thousands of Mexican locals, dozens of Mexican locations; and a great large-scaled perf from Cesar Romero as Cortez, probably the most intriguing (read least vile) of the New World colonizers. Beautifully served on DVD, the TechniColor effects, especially in Mexico under glowering skies, are both handsome & sophisticated. So too the fine Alfred Newman score.* All told, one of the best of its kind, and holding up better than might be expected.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The Newman score was released on three double-sided 10” 78rpm discs by Mercury. A rare event at the time, this was not a true soundtrack, but six specially arranged cues conducted by Newman & the Fox orchestra. (My copy still sounds pretty damn good.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: As the fiancée’s father, quite the fair-weather Marquis when a desperate Power asks for assistance, George Zucco sounds uncannily like Sir Ralph Richardson.

LES NUITS DE LA PLEINE LUNE / FULL MOON IN PARIS (1984)

Writer/director Éric Rohmer stood out among French New Wave filmmakers not so much in emphasizing talky, over-analyzing young adults (chic, attractive, delving ever deeper into shallower waters), but in how he let his multi-part series of moral fables argue against each across separate titles. And he certainly put out enough product to let that happen!; like Grandma Moses with her paintings, he worked in batches. This cautionary tale, from his Comedies & Proverbs series, isn’t so much best-of-the-set (variations in quality are hardly a deal-breaker with Rohmer, he’s a good dinner guest whatever the menu), but is a favorite among the Rohmer cognoscenti. It falls into his Be-Careful-What-You-Wish-For storylines, with Pascale Oglier as a recent interior decorator/designer grad who moves out of her fiancé’s banlieu apartment hoping separation will improve a floundering relationship that finds her extrovert ways in constant conflict with his stressed non-sociability. At first, it’s Parisian pied-à-terre heaven in her second home, with Fabrice Luchini’s insistent, if married, intellectual jabbering away in one ear, and a sexy sax player she met at a party offering rock star vibes and (just as important) the promise of a one-night-stand and early morning departure. But just as Oglier finds the answers she’s been seeking, the landscape changes underfoot. Rohmer simply nails these characters, for better and for worse (that French rock dancing!), and typically covers his sophisticated visual tracks so as to seem utterly artless. Don’t you believe it. That banlieu building might be a living Mondrian; a motorcycle ride in Paris an arrondissment of its own; Oglier’s pied-à-terre a testing ground for love & lighting. All embedded, like its lightly heartbreaking plot, under piles of fizzy (often very funny) French talk. A unique kind of filmmaker (might Aki Kaurismäki pair up?), Rohmer‘s an acquired taste worth acquiring.

DOUBLE-BILL: Usual entry point for Rohmer is MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S/’69 with Jean-Louis Trintignant.

HUMORESQUE (1946)

Joan Crawford followed her big comeback in MILDRED PIERCE/’45 by getting miscast as a rich, neurotic society lady who mentors, then falls hard for, rising concert violinist John Garfield. The film was a hit. But she might as well have been back at her old studio, M-G-M, picking up Greta Garbo's leftovers, overcompensating as an actress, and showing dangerous intimations of mannerisms to come. What remains of the old Fannie Hurst novel is all in the first half-hour*, before Crawford appears. It charts the musical fortunes of a young tenement boy, Mom’s favored child. He grows up to be Garfield, clutching his violin as a ticket out. Enter Crawford & Co., her entourage of wealthy hangers-on; an older, passive husband; and musical connections that could jumpstart a career. Love?; it tears them apart and draws them together. Mother really does know best: that lady will always be bad news. The plot, apparently lifted from Clifford Odets’ unused script for the George Gershwin bio-pic RHAPSODY IN BLUE/’45, is turgid stuff, though fun turgid. Handsomely overwrought in Ernest Haller’s lensing and smartly paced considering there’s about 40 minutes of music tucked in, by director Jean Negulesco, working his way up from shorts & B-pics. And the music is stunningly realized, with 26-yr-old Isaac Stern on the violin.* (You can’t blame Franz Waxman, who put the score & excerpts together, for that tacky finale turning Wagner’s Liebestod from TRISTAN & ISOLDE into a concertante piece for violin, piano & orchestra. Yikes! Fortunately, amid all the angst, Oscar Levant is around, cracking-wise as Garfield’s truth-telling/piano-playing pal. And getting a chance to play more than his usual Gershwin specialities. What a speed demon at the keyboard! And just as fast with snappy putdowns, largely his own quips.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Levant was just as cutting off-camera according to Jean Negulesco's auto-bio: ‘Levant to Crawford, who knitted constantly while rehearsing, eating, arguing, looking at rushes: ‘Do you knit when you fuck?’

DOUBLE-BILL: *The 1920 silent version, scripted by Frances Marion and beautifully directed by Frank Borzage, is closer to the novel. More straight MotherLove story, with mesmerizing tenement sections early on. (A severely mentally handicapped brother always sitting in the tiny living room is unforgettable.) Violin lessons in Europe; WWI; a hand injury; and a shortchanged last act with miraculous recovery & a final rendition of Dvorak’s Humoresque for a concert hall filled to the brim with immigrants. Heart-stopping stuff. Alas, no recommendable DVD even though superb elements are around.

CONTEST: *What famous NY’er now lives in Isaac Stern’s old CPW Manhattan digs? The correct answer wins a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER TWO (2017)

Taking over a fledgling franchise as solo director (after sharing the first with David Leitch), Chad Stahelski’s immediate problem is keeping a lid on production bloat, the bane of sequels to modest-budget surprise hits. Suddenly, you’ve got twice the money to play with and company men ordering you to make the original film all over again . . . but bigger. Fortunately, JOHN WICK/’14 was no classic, merely a reasonable excuse for Keanu Reeves to reclaim an ultra-cool/ultra-violent hipster vibe as an ex-master hitman forced out of retirement and back into action. Here, he’s forced back to work after refusing to honor a ‘blood marker,’ then must take on the assignment (a rubout in Rome) to set things right. Of course, the film has been all OTT bespoke action/ fashion set pieces anyway, right from the opening, and technically up a notch from the first film. As Reeves takes down scores of ultra-buff killers with Fred Astaire’s elan at mowing down chorus line boys using tap shoes & walking stick; but with a techno-beat in for Irving Berlin’s ‘Top Hat, White Tie and Tails.’ (And nearly as realistic.)  Stahelski only seriously drops the ball in the film’s over-cooked fun-house mirror finale (in a high-tech art museum), proving yet again that MORE really can be LESS. But before that, plenty of wicked funny cameos along with many amusing design details. Especially, at the swanky Hitman Hotel Club which has a positive fetish for passé technology: '70s computers & dot-matrix printers; rotary phones; pneumatic tubes; electric typewriters. Fun, if you’re in the mood.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: While much of the location scouting serves up spaces Vogue would have approved for a Fall Fashion Prada layout, someone slipped up badly on that Rockefeller Center garden terrace Ian McShane uses as a private rooftop hangout for his Hitman Hotel. You can see it used every few months on The Today Show. And just where are we supposed to be? That’s Saks Fifth Avenue’s flagship store showing due east. Maybe McShane brings guests to his aerie each December for a bird's-eye view of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony.

DOUBLE-BILL: More than the first Wick pic, this feels like a deliberate parody of the BOURNE series. Best of the bunch, THE BOURNE SUPREMACY/’04.

THE MUSIC MAN (1962)

Robert Preston’s intensely likable theatricality, hearty & artless, carries just about all before it in this (too) faithful* staging of the B’way Classic. Something of a memory musical for Meredith Willson (book, lyrics, score), it’s cornfed, but pure, a classic stranger-comes-to-town set up with fast-talking salesman Harold Hill in for a speedy turnaround on the promise of a Boys’ Band right here in River City, Iowa, before beating a quick retreat with the cash, leaving a gymnasium’s worth of broken promises. Morton DaCosta’s directing strategies, much of it straight from his original B’way staging at the Majestic Theatre, work far better in the stylized form of an integrated musical than on his AUNTIE MAME/’58 debut. Not that he holds back from placing a camera behind a piano keyboard for a trick composition, and refusing to cut production numbers begging for a trim. But then, subtlety ain’t the point on this piece of faux Americana, with a small town that might be Main Street in DisneyLand. (In a sweet piece of artistic irony, lenser Robert Burks immediately followed this tale of small town comic hysteria with small town deadly hysteria in Hitchcock's THE BIRDS/’63.*) The songs, whether brash or flowing, are cleverly designed to fit together like music puzzles, and tuneful enough to tempt even The Beatles into doing a ‘cover.’ (‘Till There was You,’ the only ‘showtune’ they ever recorded.) And how nice that the songs come straight at you instead of being snuck in as if faintly embarrassed of the basic conceit of musical comedy. Confrontation rather than finesse, and proud of the immense craft involved in pulling it off. Plus a solid cast much helped by a recent restoration that turns the whole show into Pop Art. But the key remains Preston, gaining dramatic force from visible mileage showing on his sadder-but-wiser personal chassis, even a hint of mortality. Something no one else has even thought of bringing to the role. A Special Delivery of unexpected emotion coming in on the Wells Fargo Wagon.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Weird how much Shirley Jones’s Marian the Librarian and Preston’s Harold Hill match up with Hillary & Bill Clinton. (And just how great would either couple be in THE BIRDS? Yikes!)

DOUBLE-BILL: Preston’s career was revived with the stage production, but further film roles that could make good use of his presentational/ theatrical style proved hard to find. He was largely off the screen for nearly a decade before Sam Peckinpah (of all people) let him nearly steal JUNIOR BONNER/’72. Then, another big screen lacunae before Blake Edwards found him for S.O.B./’81 and VICTOR/VICTORIA/’82.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Sharp-eared musical comedy mavens will note that one number from the stage show, MY WHITE KNIGHT, is partially replaced by the pleasant, but weaker BEING IN LOVE. (‘Partially’ as the ‘break’ is unchanged.) Why so? Scuttlebutt has it that Willson’s mentor, the great Frank Loesser (of GUYS AND DOLLS fame) had too many fingerprints in the composition of KNIGHT, and Willson wanted a number that was 100% his. It’s a good reason to look for the B’way Original Cast recording which also the advantage of Barbara Cook’s Marian and a uniquely lifelike best-seat-in-the-house acoustic.

THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (2003)

It’s a case of swings & roundabouts between the underrated 1961 original and the cable tv movie of Tennessee Williams’ novella about a recently widowed actress ‘of a certain age,’ financially well off, drifting in Rome with a much younger ‘kept’ lover. 2003 is smoother, more naturalistic, bringing out unexpected affinities to Thomas Mann’s DEATH IN VENICE that go missing in 1961.* It also has a believable stud-from-old-world-stock in Italian lover Olivier Martinez’s cash-poor Count. (Young Warren Beatty’s Italian accent in 1961 is a constant distraction.) But the more important difference is that Helen Mirren superbly acts the role of a lost, self-destructive soul caught in a downward spiral/spiritual vacuum, while Vivien Leigh in ‘61 simply was this character; frighteningly so. Even embarrassingly so. (And her best scene, early in the film telling off some old friends she bumps into on the streets of Rome, is all but tossed away in 2003.) There’s also startling Lotte Lenya as a termagant Contessa, fixing up ‘dates’ for the well-heeled (and getting a cut of the action) which out-points anything a non-Brechtian actress can offer . . . or dare, including the remake’s game Anne Bancroft. On the other hand, Advantage 2003 for Roger Allam’s Tennessee Williams inspired character. (He takes over from 1961's Coral Browne. Quite the switch!) 1961 probably holds more keys to the book’s mysteries, but 2003 is more than an addendum of corrections. (Please see separate Write-Up for ‘61.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Alas, there’s no getting ‘round Williams’ tramp/stalker/angel-of-death figure in both films. But must the 2003 wastrel look more like a high fashion model than the princely gigolos La Contessa digs up for her clients?

DOUBLE-BILL: *The 1961 film was pilloried, and the only feature from master stage director José Quintero. But any technical bumps are worth looking past for Leigh, a great beauty ravaged by mental & physical ailments at only 48. That’s ten years younger than Mirren was, and it also possibly helps explain why she was spared a last act ‘youth’ treatment/make-over that adds a good decade to the fearless Ms. Mirren, and brings out those DEATH IN VENICE echoes.

TWO SMART PEOPLE (1946)

Alternate title: One Dumb Script. M-G-M had the devil of a time finding good vehicles for Lucille Ball during her mid-‘40s stay. (Per Ball, she spent a lot of ‘down time’ hanging out with an equally underused Buster Keaton, talking comedy technique.) The studio didn’t do much better with co-star John Hodiak, either; each would shine brighter on other lots. And this hopelessly wan comic/ romantic noir certainly wasn’t the answer. Director Jules Dassin, another misused contract talent*, tries to follow the playbook about confidence man Hodiak scamming to deal half a mill in stolen bonds; Ball’s confidence gal (playing her own angles while falling for the guy); easy-going detective Lloyd Nolan (letting Hodiak take the scenic route back to NYC & a ‘doable’ prison term); and weaselly Elisha Cook Jr (claiming half the loot), but it's a logic-free mess. Though as it winds thru Mexico & New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, a studio-bound picaresque, you can see faint outlines of the glam adventure they were shooting for. That and a nickle would buy a phone call in 1946.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: One of the film’s scripters never earned another credit, the other had a seven year drought. The producer made one more feature for a grand total of two. Who says there’s no justice in Hollywood?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The sole takeaway is a ludicrous one: Elisha Cook Jr sporting a Harlequin unitard for Mardi Gras. Yikes!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Don Siegel’s THE BIG STEAL/’49 (a little known delight with Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, William Bendix) gets this sort of thing just right. OR: *Ill-used at M-G-M, Dassin broke thru at Universal on his next pic, BRUTE FORCE/’47, an ultra-tough prison drama for Burt Lancaster & Hume Cronyn.

AMEN. (2002)

Apparently, Costa-Gavras waited decades to get this fact-based, conscience-stricken WWII story made. Perhaps he waited too long. The film feels leftover from the ‘60s or ‘70s, less Costa-Gavras then Fred Zinnemann. Which might have been fine . . . with Zinnemann.* But the two filmmakers have diametrically opposed qualities: One, master of the dramatic slow fuse; the other, master of eruption. So the film satisfies neither manner charting the dangerous path of a Jesuit Priest and an SS officer whose early knowledge of Nazi atrocities needs public amplification, approbation & an irrefutable voice. Something they hope to get from Pope Pius XXII, whose Church allows its fear of Soviet Communism to trump feelings about Hitler’s Germany. Relentlessly tasteful in the telling, the film ends up starved of consequence, with the essential moral crisis of an SS officer participating in horrors to act as witness, presented rather than dramatized. And the Costa-Gavras inclination toward sensationalism stymied thru deference. The story remains fascinating, with undoubted heft to it, a handsome production and an excellent cast. (Look for Sebastian Koch soon to star in OTHER PEOPLE’S LIVES/’04.) But you’ll know why it was overlooked.

(NOTE: Another 'Family Friendly' label on a film that's definitely not for the kiddies. But good, complicated issues for Junior High and up.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Released in various languages but an all-English affair here. (And with matching English lip movements in spite of being heavily ‘looped.’) But the film would certainly play far better in German & Italian. Normally this stylistic language-swap convention is easy to accept (though less so then 40 years ago), but here, the accompanying loss in verisimilitude really hurts.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Zinnemann’s own WWII film from the ‘70s was JULIA/’77. It has its flaws, but also holds together being ‘all-of-a-piece.’

THE ATOMIC KID (1954)

Mickey Rooney was just off a major mid-career uptick (showy support in the pricey BRIDGES OF TOKO-RI/’54; outstanding lead in the excellent B-pic DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD /’54*) when he tossed any residual goodwill away in this radioactive farce. There’s nothing wrong with the basic story idea (from Blake Edwards who scripted CROOKED) which puts Rooney & dominating partner Robert Strauss on a desert uranium hunt, unaware they’ve strayed into a nuclear test site on countdown lock. Yikes! And when Strauss goes into town to make a land claim (his Geiger counter is going nuts), Mickey’s left guarding the site as the bomb blows. Miraculously, he survives: suddenly a radioactive scientific curiosity & monetizable commodity. With rich possibilities for comic development, Leslie H. Martinson, Benedict Freedman & John Fenton Murray (direction & scripters) seem in a contest to do as little as possible with the situation. And what they do come up with are standard gags that could fit just about any situation. A shame since both Rooney & Strauss play well together, largely cut back on the usual forced mugging and we even get a chance to see Mick’s very attraction wife #4 (of 7), Elaine Devry, charming as his playfully sympathetic nurse. (Plus, one very good joke that sure sounds like echt Blake Edwards: Mickey’s eating a peanut-butter, banana & pickle sandwich as the blast hits . . . and still eating it when rescued, now toasted.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Too little known, DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD is a psychologically sharp bank heist pic with Rooney leading an unusually fine B-list cast. Don’t be put off by an early bit of subpar rear-projection racing footage, the rest of Richard Quine’s direction is uncommonly fine. (And note how they dramatically use that cool below ground-level car garage. Too weird not to have been a real place.)

MACSKAJÁTÉK / CAT’S PLAY (1974)

A real slog. Recently deceased Hungarian writer/director Károly Makk loads on impenetrable imagery in this memory piece about a pair of estranged sisters (they exchange letters, but have no physical contact) sharing reveries of a close past, signified with near subliminal flashes of younger days glimpsed as faded, slightly distorted images. Reference is made to a romantic rivalry; there's disagreement over their father’s death (political execution or defeatist’s suicide?); and the younger of the two is seen losing her position as a music teacher and dealing with the possible return to her life of a once famous singer, but not much comes of these sidebar incidents. Come to think of it, not much comes of anything in here, the film proudly offering itself as a particularly woeful example of a once common opaque film festival æsthetic not much missed and little mourned. (What a tedious entry for that year’s Foreign Language Oscar® run.) An earlier film from Makk, LOVE/’71, about an old mother who’s kept from learning the truth about her political prisoner son, sounds more promising. But this film hardly whets the appetite.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: For an art house style memory film of the period, try Alain Resnais’s ultra-refined PROVIDENCE/’77.

THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS (2016)

Surprisingly disappointing. It starts well enough, if heavily indebted to TOY STORY/’95, with the idea of showing what happens at home while master is away, but pets in for toys. And if its bright digital animation looks a generation & a half behind the curve (note the dry doggie noses & lack of detail in hair & water effects), further weakened by iffy character design (who approved the animal teeth?), a general level of adorableness still comes thru in the interdependence & misunderstandings of owners & pets. But once the story leaves home for a wild adventure in the city (even with some pleasingly painterly cityscape backgrounds), the wilder-is-better plotting never comes into focus or adds up. It’s just one darn set piece after another, as busy & unpleasant as that Richard Scarry picture book you had to read to a niece twenty-five times, with rock bottom coming in an over-produced hot dog musicale.* Three shorts come on the DVD, two linked to the feature (and no better), plus a hilarious (and decidedly rude) MINIONS Lawn Service item. Something about those verbally-challenged pill-shaped creatures brings out the best from the Illumination animators.

DOUBLE-BILL: *That hot dog number is quite put in the shade by SAUSAGE PARTY, out the same year and also featuring less than state-of-the-art digital works. Not for the kiddies, it’s one of the more subversive mainstream pics of the past few years. (From Seth Rogen . . . but you don’t have to look at him.)

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET CAPTAIN KIDD (1952)

Excruciating. Slipping fast from their ‘40s peak and tv-bound this year, A&C brought their MEET Series of genre parodies over to Warners (from home studio Universal) for this laugh-free one-off. Quite a drop from the reasonably funny/frightful MEET FRANKENSTEIN/’48 to this botch, with dumbed-downed physical business aimed strictly at the 7-and-under set, and Charles Laughton’s Captain Kidd yelling all his lines to steal focus. Worse, it’s also a quasi-musical, with tuneless ditties for a pair of insipid ingenues (Fran Warren, never seen again; Bill Shirley, major pipes/zero personality) who wind up in the middle of an island treasure hunt. (His love letter and Laughton’s treasure map keep getting mixed up.) Shot cheap in ‘SuperCineColor’ (an improved single-pac sub-rival to TechniColor), its compromised tonal palette not so far off the outmoded 2-strip TechniColor process. Ironically, a process now largely recalled from Douglas Fairbanks’ comic pirate adventure THE BLACK PIRATE/’26. And yet, the best things in here come via lenser Stanley Cortez in some handsome, static shots of four-masted ships under a moonlit sky.* (Or did the special effects unit get them?) Charles Lamont, who made fistfuls of A&C when not megging fistfuls of MA AND PA KETTLE, no doubt in his sleep, seems reluctant to engage with the action in any way at all. ‘Plant camera/let boys play.’ And what a nasty edge Abbott now brings to his comic exasperation. Not an ounce of joy left anywhere you look.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: As mentioned, best of the series: ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Somehow, Laughton took note of Stanley Cortez in the midst of this, hiring him as cinematographer for the dreamlike terror & wonder in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER/’55.

IM LABYRINTH DES SCHWEIGENS / LABYRINTH OF LIES (2014)

Out a year before THE PEOPLE VS. FRITZ BAUER/’15, and telling much the same story of Germans in the late '50s finally starting to prosecute their own Nazi war criminals living just down the street as butcher, baker or friendly neighbor, LIES takes in a wider angle and a younger generation's POV. It’s certainly the more polished work, though perhaps not for the better, with writer/director Giulio Ricciarelli (his first & only film) showing a technique slick enough for a Stateside film school. But does this story want that approach? Opening with a meet-cute for our young prosecutor & his future fiancée? Charting their up & down relationship as mirror to success & frustration at the monumental task he’s been given by boss Fritz Bauer? And if the later film sports an academic dryness that curbs its potential, better that than this film’s manipulated story beats & prosecutorial gym-sculpted abs. (Bauer’s dangerous illegal steps into international espionage also go missing.) Even over-processed, there’s enough emotional power to the issues so that you are pulled along. (An early scene with fellow workers coming up blank on Auschwitz is plenty chilling.) And there are unusually fine supporting players back at the office on both sides of the controversy: Prosecute or Move-On. But perhaps inevitably, following the formula of legal underdog bio-pic cheapens this touchiest of subjects.

DOUBLE-BILL: You rarely get a chance to see two films tackle the same topic at the same time in such a different manner. And with each seriously flawed, it’s less contest of quality than chance to spot the right style. Advantage: THE PEOPLE VS. FRITZ BAUER. (Write-Up below.)

A CRY IN THE NIGHT (1956)

After being kidnapped by an Apache in THE SEARCHERS, Natalie Wood found herself, later that year in her first adult role, kidnapped again, now by a mentally & emotionally stunted Raymond Burr. A slightly ridiculous, but rather entertaining (below) B-budgeted derangement from Alan Ladd’s Jaguar Productions (he narrates), at 75" it looks designed for quickie double-bills, but with an exceptional line-up of character actors on hand: hard-driving cop Edmond O’Brien, Wood’s overprotective father; chief-detective Brian Donlevy; Richard Anderson as the fiancé who gets conked on the head; and Raymond Burr as the creepy perv at ‘Lover’s Loop’ who carts her off after an altercation. (Even more ‘familiars’ in bit parts.) As producer, Ladd surely stuck his neck out offering this to ‘gray-listed’ helmer Frank Tuttle, director of Ladd’s breakout THIS GUN FOR HIRE/’42; and Tuttle does what he can. But a very uneven, often laughable, script is overloaded with ‘Pop’ Freudian psychology: Daddy-issues for O’Brien & Wood; Mommy-issues for Burr’s psycho. (Burr also gets a big dose of Lenny from OF MICE AND MEN, with dead puppy in for dead rabbit.) Makes for a lot of scenery chewing; no one more so than O’Brien, determined to make Father-issues paramount. (Astute observation or actor’s jealousy?) John Seitz, Ladd’s regular lenser at the time, can do little on the cheap soundstage sets (an L.A. nighttime cyclorama is a particular horror), but also manages some impressive noir stylings when given the chance.* Same could be said for the pic as a whole.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Two years later, again with Ladd as ‘silent’ producer, Tuttle & Seitz all but ended their careers with one of the all-time goofball Sci-Fi guilty-pleasures, ISLAND OF LOST WOMEN, loaded with quotable dialogue & business that can make you shake with laughter merely recalling it decades later.

IL CAPITALE UMANO (2013)

In his too-clever-by-half financial morality play, Paolo Virzi’s award-collecting film jars right from its initial misguided move from the East Coast USA of Stephen Amidon’s novel to Milan & environs. At first, it plays like an updated early-‘60s social satire of Il Boom, the post-WWII economic ‘miracle’ that proved unsustainable. At their best when Alberto Sordi was cast as an overextended middle-class businessman, trying to leverage iffy loans into the big time. A scenario revived here for Fabrizio Bentivoglio, a real-estate agent who gets in over his head with slick hedge-funder Fabrizio Gifuni. Virzi serves up tennis for the men, and a romance between their kids as the tie that binds, but without Sordi’s verve & comic attack (plus the stylistic abstraction of b&w cinematography), it’s a hard connection to swallow on any level. Things greatly improve in the following three chapters as events (financial crisis, infidelity, high school breakups, drinking) refract on the film’s prologue of a shadowy driving accident injuring an anonymous bicyclist. All cleverly laid out in crisscrossed perspectives from different parties to the events. (Less clever the barefaced planting of clues to keep the plot in gear.) The structural influence of Asghar Farhadi far superior A SEPARATION/’11, out two years previously, is obvious. But where that film’s shifting perspectives kept revealing more of characters you grew to know as family, here the technique is forced on the material with Virzi, navigating from Stateside to Italian cultures, always outside character & events.*  Certainly worth a look, mostly for meeting up with a fine cast of actors.  (As the rich, unfulfilled wife, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi is primus inter pares, while only an over-parted Bentivoglio, in the Sordi spot, disappoints.) But something self-congratulatory hangs over the film.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, A SEPARATION. This film follows its template, but lands closer to the pretentious crisscrossed-fate fare of BABEL/’06 or CRASH/’04.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *To see what’s missing elsewhere, try the film’s funniest/meanest scene where our rich, rich wife holds an initial meeting with an OTT advisory board she’s selected to help organize the pet project Theatre Restoration she hopes to get off the ground.  The situation reeks of real-life experience.

GLORIA (2013)

Well-received, but slightly off-putting middle-aged romance (make that anti-romance) about a lonely divorcée looking for . . . what? A partner? A cat? Sex? Someone to dance with? More involvement from her single son (with kid) and single daughter (with one on the way)? As slackly written & directed by Sebastián Lelio, Paulina García’s Gloria must be the most over-booked 50-something woman in Chile, with something going on every night. And not in the sad manner of filling out a dance card with empty gestures, staying busy to keep existential despair away, she’s much too enthusiastic to be read that way. (And the film, to its credit, isn’t marketing simple sympathy.) She ought to be too exhausted for the older mystery man she’s met at her favored dance club. Cinematically, the sex is unusually frank for this age group, but it’s her boyfriend’s manner of abruptly absenting himself from social situations that’s really odd. And why is he hiding her from his over-dependent daughters? (And wife?; he may not be divorced.) Gloria can’t figure him out. But neither can the film. He’s more literary device than character. We’re meant to applaud this single woman who, like a Timex watch, takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’, but Gloria’s refusal to sit on life’s sidelines feels built out of overused aphorisms. While the film’s final life-affirming dance (a solo in the midst of couples) to (what else?) G-L-O-R-I-A, Gloria!, is the sort of crap uplift you might expect to find Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton & Bette Midler vamping to at the end of FIRST WIVES CLUB/’96.

GUADALCANAL (1943)

Except for Lamar Trotti, a top writer @ 20th/Fox, this WWII war drama, made within a year of the fighting portrayed, is strictly a B-list affair, above & below the line. But if limited star power & a modest budget cut down on bloat, there’s not much very new or exciting going on. Instead, the usual motley crew of mostly untested marines, goofing around with (eyebrow-raising) brotherly behavior before the tone takes a sharp turn to scared & serious when they spot the convoy they’ve joined overnight and reach enemy shore. A deceptively easy landing is followed by a months-long death-plagued slog grabbing hostile territory and clearing out the Japanese. Dramatically, the story moves from fighting encounter ‘A’ to fighting encounter ‘B’ without much in the way of dramatic organization, and perhaps it felt that way on the ground. But a lack of spontaneity from the boys or a sense of how officers had to plan on the wing to meet changing circumstances, leaves this feeling pretty standard issue. And they show exactly what’s been missing in the film’s best sequence, a brisk, well laid-out operation to remove Japanese hold-outs who are using natural island caves as shooting bunkers, smartly handled by journeyman helmer Lewis Seiler. (His next was SOMETHING FOR BOYS/’44 with Carmen Miranda!) But nothing else in here lives up to it. Lots of up-and-comers in the cast: Anthony Quinn, Richards Conte & Jaeckel, and good relief (most, but not all comic) from William Bendix who also gets stuck with the pic’s big philosophical/religious speech. (At least they keep Chaplain Preston Foster from delivering it.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: All the studios, major & minor, put out grunts-go-to-battle projects. Even the lousy ones hold some interest in charting changing public moods at the time of release. 1943 was pretty low, so this film is tough, but optimistic. Easier to pull off when battle deaths are so bloodlessly depicted.

CRISIS (1950)

Famed M-G-M producer Arthur Freed, in a rare non-musical, gave writer Richard Brooks his first shot as writer/ director in this gimmicky South American political thriller. Mostly worth watching for Cary Grant’s intense reserve (all banked fires & imploding resentment*), it’s your typical neurosurgeon on South American holiday, operating on a dictator’s brain tumor in the midst of a burgeoning Peoples’ Revolution. Where’s my travel agent! A swaggering stylist, say Vincente Minnelli or Douglas Sirk, might just have brought this off, absurdities be damned, but Brooks was no stylist at the time (or later come to think of it), using all his energies to keep his plot in order. Nice support from Latin stalwarts like Ramon Novarro (as a military baddie) & Gilbert Roland (a Commie man-of-the-people type, not that his party is mentioned) helps make up for non-starter Paula Raymond in a failed star push as Grant’s endangered wife. Swedish Signe Hasso makes a nice stab as an Eva Perón type, but the guy having the most fun has to be composer Miklós Rózsa making like Heitor Villa-Lobos. Musically, that’s Brazil rather than Argentina, but still a lot closer to South America than the repurposed backlot sets Cedric Gibbons made Brooks shoot on. Those cobblestones! Brooks always knew how to structure a plot, but even when he lands the camera in the right spot, he can’t get a rhythm going; hitting a nadir in a couple of Eisenstein-inspired tries at Soviet-style montage. Surprisingly watchable even so, or is until its indigestible Have-Your-Cake-And-Eat-It-Too² ending.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Grant pulls off this tricky tone for another writer/director of limited style, Joseph Mankiewicz, in PEOPLE WILL TALK/’51. The trick probably lies in the way that film gives him a chance, missing here, for release at the climax. (Even more clearly revealed with Hitchcock in NOTORIOUS/’46.)

IN THE COOL OF THE DAY (1963)

Infidelity drama finds a couple of couples drifting apart in one of those early ‘60s pics that works hard to reflect changing mores, stretching the old Production Code in the process. As if everyone involved saw Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA/ '60, admired it, smelled something new in the air, then got it all wrong. Attempting a more Euro/Adult tone, they just manage disagreeable. Progress! Arthur Hill is the adoring husband of frail, health-challenged Jane Fonda (so unlike our radiant poster gal); while old British buddy Peter Finch is married to drama queen Angela Lansbury with whom he shares a tragic past. What a foursome for a holiday in Greece! But Hill backs out of the trip, and Finch’s declared, if chaste love for Fonda hots up; quickened once Lansbury steps out with a pick up. Dreary, unconvincing stuff in scenic locales, with Lansbury winning the Most Disagreeable Trophy . . . and eventually our respect for blunt honesty and as the only lively thing in the pic. She’s both horrid and funny. Whatever it was producer John Houseman* saw in the material remains unrealized under Robert Stevens laissez-faire directorial hand, with Fonda very raw against all those pros.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: As mentioned, L’AVVENTURA which shows up the tacked on melodrama this film still clings to.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: *Or rather don’t read all about it as Houseman’s third volume of memories, FINAL DRESS, skips this film entirely.

SOMETHING FOR THE BIRDS (1952)

This throwaway programmer (a modest-to-a-fault Capra-esque political comedy about a naive environmentalist in Washington trying to save the California Condor) must have felt like a comedown for everyone involved. Not so much bad as unwanted. Squarely helmed by fast-rising Robert Wise, the film wants a fanciful touch out of his range to spin its gently humorous situation into farce. At least, that’s the idea with Edmund Gwenn’s doughty engraver nipping invitation ‘proofs’ to get into all the top parties in town. Known as ‘The Admiral,’ an idea he does nothing to stop, that’s how he meets fellow-gatecrasher Patricia Neal, the condor protector working to stop passage of a natural gas excavation bill threatening her endangered birds. Topical, no? And it’s also where she meets the Admiral’s old pal, lobbyist Victor Mature, who takes a fancy to her, unaware his own firm represents the bill’s main sponsor. Hilarity ensues. Well, more modest chuckles, though one sharp comic scene with Mature expecting more than a nightcap back at Neal’s hotel is a pleasant surprise. And speaking of surprises, there’s Mature himself, looking trim & sophisticated instead of blunt & beefy (you’ll want his tailor), holding his own against Neal & Gwenn’s more relaxed, nuanced playing. All the same, twee stuff that misses the biggest question of all: why would anyone sneak into one of those dreary Washington gatherings most D.C.’ers would do just about anything to get out of.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: This was more-or-less it for Patricia Neal’s first round in Hollywood. (And no match for her previous Robert Wise pic, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL/'51.) Punted around from Warners to M-G-M to 20th/Fox over four years (starting in 1949), her next major film would be A FACE IN THE CROWD/’57, and even then, no major Hollywood calls for nearly a decade after this when HUD/’63 finally established her bona fides until she was cut down by a major stroke while shooting John Ford’s 7 WOMEN/’66.

AGORA (2009)

It’s an old punch line, but the Christians really are revolting in this misconceived historical from Alejandro Amenábar, still living off his overblown rep from SEA INSIDE/’04 (see below). Here, in a paradisaical 4th Century Alexandria, intellectual curiosity & free-spirited academia allow Professor Rachel Weisz, comely daughter of wise old Michael Lonsdale, to lead a motley class of ‘brothers’ (multi-cultural/multi-ethnic/multi-faith) in pursuit of high mathematics & higher celestial bodies. Modified rapture, if only Teach would return all the longing looks from her chaste, horny students. But even in this renowned library town, abstract studies may not survive the fast-coming saturation tipping-point of Fundamentalist Christian Terrorists.* (The religious cult in GAME OF THRONES has nothing on these guys. Indeed, quite the prescient GoT vibe here, particularly in the iffy CGI-enhanced settings.) And neither Roman Rulers, led by rebuffed former student Oscar Issac in his first lead, nor former/ favored freed-slave-turned-true-believer Max Minghella (son of director Anthony Minghella) can keep a lid on the radical faction. All happening just as Weisz is on the verge of discovering elliptical orbit. Yikes! The goofy charm of Major Film Folly hovers over much of this, with a Stateside trim keeping it just over two-hours. But the film probably needed to be either much, much better, or much, much worse to make a mark.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Amenábar tries hard to locate this ultra-strict/violent Christian sect somewhere between ISIS & the Nazi SS. But since we never see what they replace (only the enchanted closeted academic world behind library walls), the parallels don’t resonate.

DOUBLE-BILL: An early CinemaScope dud, THE EGYPTIAN/’54, has like concerns, but is too dramatically limp to take advantage of its handsome production & unique shared Alfred Newman/Bernard Herrmann score.

ALL THE WAY (2016)

On stage, this LBJ bio-play, covering the Civil Rights Act and his reelection bid in the year that followed the Kennedy assassination, must have made for a lusty pageant. Four-score once famous political names of the ‘60s, played by one score of actors. (Only Johnson, Sen. Richard Russell & Martin Luther King Jr not ‘doubling.’) Everyone barrels thru yards of political exposition & half remembered history at a safe distance, theatrical comfort food, as predigested as macaroni & (processed) cheese, and nearly as tasty. The HBO film version, snappily put together by play author Robert Schenkkan (Jay Roach megging), sorely misses its proscenium stylization, the weight of live presentation, with little to take its place since Schenkkan’s idea of depth rarely gets past twice-told family stories. And you can only marvel at physically apt casting & clever facial prosthetics for so long after a first entrance. (Bryan Cranston’s LBJ transformation got the lion’s share of approbation, but should share First Prize with Melissa Leo’s spot-on Lady Bird.) As potted history, it’s Junior High School stuff (in a good way, if too raw/scatological to screen without a parent’s note), at its best in showing just how many factions LBJ had to piss off, how ruthless he needed to be, how friendless he became, to get it all done. No small thing that; as play or man.

DOUBLE-BILL: A gay blackmail angle recalls a similar subplot in Otto Preminger’s superb Washington D.C. drama ADVISE & CONSENT/’62.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Rob Reiner & Woody Harrelson currently have the ill luck to be waiting out release of nearly the same story on the big screen in LBJ. Scheduled to hit theaters in November; also scheduled to leave in November.

WITNESS TO MURDER (1954)

Close only counts in horseshoes . . . and movies. As in this not-quite-there Chester Erskine production, from his original script, with journeyman director Roy Rowland & lenser John (‘Prince of Darkness’) Alton not always able to get around a thuddingly obvious first act and some all too convenient plot beats that come into play when Barbara Stanwyck looks across the street from her apartment window to witness George Sanders killing his mistress.* The police investigate, but Sanders cleaned up too well. No evidence; so Stanwyck’s insistence looks like hysteria. She stews while Sanders sets up traps to incriminate her for slander & harassment, even with detective Gary Merrill on her side & offering a sympathetic shoulder. But Erskine doesn’t sweat the details, so the film keeps bumping up against its own plot twists, leaning too hard on overheard conversations & apartment break-ins to move ahead. Still, the basic idea takes hold, and the characterizations are a lot of fun; Merrill & Stanwyck match up nicely while Sanders has a field day with his calm Nietzschean Superman demeanor. And if too much suspense gets left on the table, enough comes thru to induce a reasonable pay-off in shivers.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Alton helps Stanwyck on her close-ups with what looks to be carefully judged gauze shots rather than the more common soft-focus or Vaseline-on-the-lens tricks.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Often compared to Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW/’54 (which opened later), WITNESS is closer to Stanwyck’s own SORRY, WRONG NUMBER/’48 and to THE WINDOW/’49, a minor classic with young Bobby Driscoll unable to convince anyone he’s seen a murder; developed from the same Cornell Woolrich short story used for REAR WINDOW.

SHE BEAST (1966)

Writer/director Michael Reeves managed just three horror pics before dying @ 25 of ‘accidental overdose;’ this zero-budget debut, a bare-bones budget Boris Karloff (THE SORCERERS/’67) and then Vincent Price in THE CONQUEROR WORM/’68. This one, his first, finds Barbara Steele on honeymoon in Transylvania with Ian Ogilvy. But when their car develops a mind of its own, it drives them straight into a haunted lake where the evil spirit of a witch still lives; she’d been dunked & drowned a couple of centuries ago. Now, transmogrification in the inky depths has the old witch change places with Steele. Fortunately, John Karlsen’s Count von Helsing is around to offer assistance in bringing back the bride. Silly stuff, but worth a look, especially for Horror heads, since Reeves had a natural talent for these things, with an easy filmmaking style that hums along and even seems to be making sense while you watch. Not far from one of those classic Roger Corman fright pics . . . if Roger Corman could only direct. Whether Reeves could have moved beyond terror trash will never be known, but he certainly had real visual talent, with technical chops giving this film a confident look & feel far beyond expectations.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: It couldn’t have been easy for Dark Sky to locate such good source material for their dandy looking DVD. Released under various titles, many subpar discs still circulate.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: For a change, the commentary track (with leads Steele, Ogilvy & producer Paul Maslansky) is a hoot, loaded with info & juicy gossip. Remarkably so, knowing that Steele shot her role in a single (very long) day.